Selling Hitler Read online

  On the night of 1 November 1945, Trevor-Roper presented a summary of his findings to an audience of sceptical journalists in the Hotel-am-Zoo in Berlin. One of them, the Newsweek correspondent, James P. O’Donnell, later recalled the confident impression he made: a ‘dapper’ figure in his wartime uniform, crisp and sarcastic, ‘a master of tart understatement’.

  That evening, Trevor-Roper told for the first time the story of Hitler’s death which has since become familiar: the final appearance of the Führer, accompanied by Eva Braun, to say goodbye to his staff; their retirement to his sitting room; their deaths – his by a revolver bullet, hers by poison – and their subsequent cremation in the garden of the Chancellery. Trevor-Roper fixed the time of death as ‘shortly after 2.30p.m. on 30 April 1945’ and he concluded with a magisterial rebuke to the press:

  There is no evidence whatever to support any of the theories that have been circulated and which presuppose that Hitler is still alive. All such stories which have been reported have been investigated and have been found to be quite baseless; most of them have dissolved at the first touch of fact and some of them have been admitted by their authors to have been pure fabrication.

  ‘As of that evening,’ wrote O’Donnell, ‘most of the international press stationed in Berlin was finally convinced that Hitler was indeed dead.’ His handling of the case earned Trevor-Roper the title ‘The Sleuth of Oxford’.

  The inquiry was an unprecedented opportunity for an ambitious young historian. With the permission of British intelligence Trevor-Roper turned the information he had collected into a book. The Last Days of Hitler appeared in 1947. It was hailed in Britain as ‘a masterpiece’. In the United States, Arthur Schlesinger Jr declared it ‘a brilliant professional performance’. The book has since been reprinted thirteen times in Great Britain alone. By 1983 its world-wide sales amounted to almost half a million copies. Trevor-Roper bought a Bentley on the proceeds and for a while was said to hold the record for driving from Oxford to London in under an hour.

  Behind the Iron Curtain, the book was banned. ‘The Polish edition was stifled in the publisher’s office,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘the Bulgarian edition destroyed by the police on its appearance.’ The Russian position remained unchanged. ‘It was never allowed that Hitler might be dead. It was assumed, and sometimes openly stated, that he was alive.’ This doctrine officially remained in force until 1968 when the communist author Lev Bezymenski was allowed to publish the autopsy report in his book The Death of Adolf Hitler. Even then the truth had to be distorted for political effect. In his anxiety to avoid being captured alive, Hitler appears to have simultaneously pulled the trigger of a revolver held to his head and bitten on a glass ampoule of cyanide clenched between his teeth. But despite the unanimous evidence of the witnesses in the bunker that they heard a shot, despite the fact that the autopsy report itself stated that ‘part of the cranium’ was ‘missing’, Bezymenski insisted that Hitler had only taken poison and had thus died ‘like a dog’: it was apparently still important to the Soviet Union that Hitler should be depicted as too cowardly to take the soldier’s way out. Twenty-three years after the concealment of its discovery, the corpse had not lost its propaganda value.

  Researched at first hand in the interrogation cell and the secret service registry, The Last Days of Hitler was unique: the insight of an historian combined with the scholarship of an intelligence officer on active service. Trevor-Roper was given access to the diaries of Goering’s chief of staff, General Koller, as well as those of Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance. He was the first to make use of the diary kept by Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, discovered by a British officer amid the ruins of the Chancellery in September 1945. In the middle of November, after the completion of his original report, he was summoned back to Germany from leave in Oxford to authenticate Hitler’s last will and testament. Shortly afterwards, in pursuit of two missing copies of that document, he led a group of CIC officers in a midnight raid on a house near the Austrian border. After a long interrogation session he finally broke the resistance of a German major who admitted possessing a copy of Hitler’s will. The major led him into the garden of his home and in the darkness broke open the frozen ground with an axe to retrieve a bottle: ‘breaking the bottle with the axe, he drew out and handed to me the last missing document….’

  Such colourful adventures set Trevor-Roper apart from more conventional academic historians. His experience taught him that Nazi documents could surface unexpectedly in all manner of unlikely places. He also appreciated that it was sometimes necessary to deal with unorthodox and even unsavoury characters. One could not afford to be too squeamish. In 1952, he met Francois Genoud, a Swiss lawyer whom he described at the time in the Sunday Express as ‘an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer’. Genoud, a former member of the SS, whose name was later to be linked with the Palestine Liberation Organization, had obtained over a thousand type-written pages known as the Bormann–Vermerke: the ‘Bormann Notes’. They were meticulously kept in Martin Bormann’s personal custody and he had written upon them, ‘Notes of fundamental interest for the future. To be preserved with the greatest care.’ They proved to be the transcripts of more than three hundred of Hitler’s mealtime monologues: the interminable, rambling soliloquies which had passed for conversation at the Führer’s dinner table and which had been recorded on Bormann’s orders as if they were Holy Writ. The material legally belonged to Genoud. After the war he had acquired the copyright in Hitler’s literary estate from the dictator’s sister, Paula. Similar contracts had been agreed with Bormann’s widow and the heirs of Josef Goebbels (‘these poor people,’ Genoud later called them, ‘whose rights and property have been plundered’). Trevor-Roper edited, introduced and helped arrange publication of Genoud’s material, which appeared in 1953 as Hitler’s Table Talk.

  Fascinating, yet simultaneously tedious and repellent in its grinding prose and vertiginous imagery, the book captures the authentic voice of Hitler. Lunch might find him lecturing Dr Porsche on the superiority of the air-cooled engine; over dinner he would hold forth on the origins of the planet. He had an opinion about everything: the inability of the English to perform Shakespeare, the ‘harmfulness of cooked foods’, the legends of ancient Greece, the toad (‘a degenerate frog’), Winston Churchill (‘an utterly immoral, repulsive creature’), the ‘negroid’ appearance of Eleanor Roosevelt, prelunar civilization and the mental capacity of a dog. In his brilliant introductory essay, Trevor-Roper depicted Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries’.

  For Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk was the first of a series of such commissions. In 1954, he edited Martin Bormann’s letters. In 1956 he wrote the introduction to the Memoirs of Dr Felix Kersten, the faith-healer and masseur who treated Himmler and other senior Nazis. When Genoud produced what purported to be the final entries of the Bormann–Vermerke in the late 1950s, covering the last few weeks of the war, Trevor-Roper provided the foreword. For more than thirty years, if a publisher had documents from the Third Reich whose presentation required the imprimatur of a well-known academic, he was the first person they turned to. In the 1970s, when the West German company of Hoffmann and Campe acquired, from mysterious sources behind the Iron Curtain, 16,000 pages of Josef Goebbels’s diaries, Trevor-Roper was appointed to edit the section devoted to 1945. And all the time he continued to turn out articles and essays about the Nazis and their Führer, many of them written in a vituperative style typical of academic debate in general, and of Trevor-Roper’s technique in particular. He denounced the so-called ‘memoirs’ of Hitler’s sister-in-law Bridget as a fake. He ridiculed the inaccuracies of A Man Called Intrepid. He attacked A. J. P. Taylor’s thesis about
the origins of the Second World War as ‘demonstrably false’. Errors were punished, positions defended.

  ‘Trevor-Roper’, complained Taylor in 1983, ‘thought he had taken out a patent in Hitler.’

  THREE

  HITLER’S BUNKER IN Berlin was blown up by the Russians in 1947, his house at Berchtesgaden by the Americans in 1952. The motive in each case was to deny any renascent Nazi movement a shrine. But interest in Hitler could not be destroyed. It continued to grow, like weeds amidst the rubble.

  Although The Last Days of Hitler put a stop to much of the outlandish speculation about the Nazi dictator’s fate, it did not end it entirely. A close personal following of cranks, misfits, fantasists and criminals continued to attend Adolf Hitler in death as in life. In December 1947 a German pilot calling himself Baumgart swore in an affidavit that he had flown Hitler and Eva Braun to Denmark a few days before the end of the war. ‘Baumgart afterwards retired to a lunatic asylum in Poland,’ noted Trevor-Roper. Six months later a film actor from the South Tyrol named Luis Trenker produced what he claimed were Eva Braun’s diaries. Wochenend, a romantic magazine for women, based in Munich, undertook to publish them. For a short time, Wochenend’s breathless readers were treated to Eva’s intimate reminiscences: how Hitler forced her to wear leather underwear, how naked dances at the Berghof turned into midnight orgies, how Hitler feared water but loved having his feet bathed. It was exotic drivel of a high order, but unfortunately a few weeks later it was officially declared a forgery. In 1950 the proprietor of Tempo Der Watt, a pro-Nazi magazine, claimed to have heard from Martin Bormann that Hitler was living in a Tibetan monastery. ‘We shall not give up the fight as long as we live,’ Bormann was quoted as saying. A French magazine reported sightings of Hitler, minus his moustache, in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Tokyo. In 1956 The Times reported rumours that recordings of Hitler’s voice, allegedly made in the previous twelve months, were being produced and sold in West Germany.

  Another German periodical, Herzdame, adopted a fresh approach in the autumn of 1949. Hitler, it revealed, had fathered an illegitimate son in Munich some time before the First World War. The son, Wilhelm Baur, had committed suicide shortly after his father, in May 1945, but his children – the Führer’s grandchildren – were still alive, ‘somewhere in Germany’. This baseless story nevertheless engendered a spate of imitations until, by the mid-1970s, there were enough Hitler children clamouring for attention to fill a sizeable nursery. Most were straightforward confidence tricksters like Franz Weber-Richter who swindled 15 million pesos and 50,000 marks out of a group of ex-Nazis in Argentina: their suspicions apparently were not aroused even by his additional claim to have spent eighteen months on the planet Venus. In 1965 the daughter of Tilly Fleischer, a famous German sportswoman who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was persuaded by her boyfriend to compile a book, Adolf Hitler Was My Father. Extracts appeared in a German picture magazine under the headline ‘If Only Hitler Knew’, before police put a stop to the hoax. Claimants were still coming forward twelve years later. In 1977 a Frenchman, Jean Lorret, told an international press conference in a fine display of filial loyalty that he had decided to reveal the secret of his parentage in order ‘to let the world know that Hitler was not impotent’. The stories have varied over the years but two characteristics have remained constant: their inherent implausibility and the willingness of someone, usually a journalist, to believe them.

  Mercifully, despite the fears of the Allies, the post-war interest in Hitler generally centred on the man rather than his ideology. To this day there has been no popular resurgence in support for Hitler’s ideas. In 1983, the West German government estimated the number of active neo-Nazis at less than 2000, a feeble legacy for a movement which once dominated every level of German society and conquered much of continental Europe. One of the most singular features of the Nazi phenomenon was the extent to which National Socialism ultimately proved to be totally dependent upon its creator. Hitler occasionally used to picture himself as a spider at the centre of an enormous web. Without him, in the spring of 1945, this complex system of interlocking institutions, which had once appeared so powerful, simply melted away. It was not merely Hitler’s state which died with him: the beliefs which had underpinned it died too. As Professor J. P. Stern put it, people who had once followed him had ‘real difficulty in recalling the message now that the voice was gone’. Afterwards this served to focus yet more attention on Hitler. How did he do it? What was he like?

  To begin with, in Germany at least, the enormity of Hitler’s career made it difficult even to ask such questions. The period from 1933 to 1945 was largely ignored in school curricula. Anyone displaying Nazi mementoes or even publishing photographs of the period was liable to prosecution. Hitler was a subject of acute sensitivity. As late as 1962 the West German embassy in London felt compelled to make an official protest over a British television play, Night Conspirators, which imagined that after seventeen years of exile in Iceland, Hitler had returned to Germany. Mein Kampf was banned. When Hutchinson’s, owners of the British copyright, decided to republish it, the Bavarian State authorities declared their ‘strong opposition’. ‘The German authorities regret our decision,’ acknowledged the publishers in a note at the front of the book, ‘thinking that it may prove damaging to new understandings and friendships.’ In 1967, when a publisher in Spain also proposed a new edition, the Bonn government intervened and bought the Spanish rights itself to stop him.

  But in the decade which followed, this reticence about the past was gradually transformed. The curiosity of a generation born after the collapse of the Third Reich coincided in 1973 with the fortieth anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power. That year saw an unprecedented surge of interest in Adolf Hitler, a tide of books, articles and films which the Germans dubbed the ‘Hitler-Welle’: the Hitler Wave. Joachim C. Fest, a former editor-in-chief of NDR television, published his monumental biography, the first comprehensive account of Hitler’s life in German to appear since 1945. Fest began his book with a question unthinkable a decade earlier: ‘Ought we to call him “great”?’ Hitler became a bestseller, serialized in Stern and described as ‘the Book of the Year’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Führer’s domination of the display stands at Frankfurt was such that the German satirical magazine Pardon hired an actor to impersonate him. Their ‘Hitler’ visited the Fair to demand a share of the royalties. He was arrested.

  The effects of the Hitler Wave were felt across the world. In America more than twenty new books about Hitler were published. Two film producers, Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam, released a documentary, Swastika, which included the Eva Braun home movies seized by the CIC in 1945: the cans were discovered by a researcher in the archives of the US Marine and Signal Corps. In February, Frank Finlay starred in The Death of Adolf Hitler. Three months later, Sir Alec Guinness appeared in Hitler: The Last Ten Days. The film was banned by the Jewish management of the ABC–EMI cinema chain. The Israelis denied it a licence. ‘The figure of the assassin’, complained the Israeli Censorship Board, ‘is represented in a human light without giving expression to the terrible murders for which he is responsible.’

  Guinness confessed that in playing the part he had found it ‘difficult not to succumb to Hitler’s charm. He had a sweet smile and a very sentimental Austrian charm.’ The BBC, despite protests, showed Leni Riefenstahi’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. To Hutchinson’s commercial pleasure but editorial embarrassment, the reissued Mein Kampf, despite an artificially high price to discourage mass sales, had to be reprinted twice. A delegation from the British Board of Deputies tried to dissuade the company from bringing out a paperback edition. They failed, and Hutchinson’s sold a further 10,000 copies. Foreign language editions appeared in Denmark, Sweden and Italy. The Sunday Telegraph wrote of ‘the astonishing resurgence of the Hitler cult’. Time reported a ‘worldwide revival’ of interest in the Nazi leader: ‘Adolf Hitler’s presence never vanishes. His career is still the
fundamental trauma of the century.’

  The 1970s also witnessed a corresponding boom in sales of Hitler memorabilia. In the immediate aftermath of the war this activity, too, had been discouraged by the German authorities. In 1948 a ruling by a denazification court that ‘Hitler was an active Nazi’ enabled the State of Bavaria to seize his personal property – principally his private apartment in Munich, some money owed to him by a Nazi publishing company, and a few valuable paintings. (Eva Braun’s home, bought for her by Hitler in 1935, was also confiscated and donated to a restitution fund for the victims of Nazism.) Three years later, the Bavarian government made use of its powers to prevent Hitler’s former Munich housekeeper, Frau Anni Winter, from selling a trunkful of the Führer’s private property. Under the terms of Hitler’s will, she was entitled to ‘personal mementoes’ sufficient ‘for the maintenance of a modest middle-class standard of living’. She inherited such relics as Hitler’s gun licence, his Nazi Party membership card, some of his watercolours, a copy of Mein Kampf and the original letter from President Hindenburg inviting Hitler to become Chancellor in 1933. For these and other treasures, Frau Winter was offered $250,000 by an American collector. The authorities promptly intervened and impounded the bulk of the collection, leaving her, bitterly resentful, with what they imagined to be a handful of valueless scraps.